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entry Jun 19 2006, 06:08 PM
If, when stopped, it will sometimes grind going into 1st from neutral, the problem is most likely that you just had it out of gear, clutch out, then pushed in the clutch, and tried to engage 1st. True?

If so, then the problem is actually the 1st gear synchro, not the clutch or the bushings or anything else. What's going on is that you have the clutch out, with the lever in neutral. This allows the engine to spin the input shaft, but not the output shaft. Pushing the clutch in disconnects the engine from the input shaft, but the shaft doesn't come to a halt instantly. When you try to engage gear, the 1st gear on the stopped output shaft tries to stop the still spinning input shaft. This is what the synchros do. They're effectively brakes. If the synchro is worn, the brake won't be very effective, and you'll be able to move the gear into mesh faster than the brake can slow the input shaft, and you get grinding.

The trick is to push in the clutch and wait a bit before trying to engage 1st from neutral. Engaging 3rd (which usually has a synchro in better shape, simply because it's used less and the speed differential when it is used is less than 1st) before 1st will help, as the 3rd gear synchro will be able to stop (or at least slow) the input shaft. No grinding.

If the clutch is misadjusted so it doesn't quite disengage, then it will make the problem worse, as the input shaft will never quite stop spinning, and you're forcing the synchro to make the clutch slip and stall the input shaft. This, obviously, is hard for a worn synchro to do, and wears out the synchro even faster. However, even with a perfectly adjusted clutch, you can get this problem.

entry Mar 23 2006, 06:20 PM
Converting from carbs to D-Jet:

As people are coming to realize that carbs on an otherwise stock engine are a pretty stupid idea, data on converting back to EFI is being sought.

This SHOULD be fairly simple to do, since all the parts just bolt on. The trick is, knowing WHAT parts you need if the car has carbs on it now.

1. ECU (aka "brain")
2. MPS (you need to test it with a vacuum pump to see if it will hold pressure)
3. intake runners (2 pieces, each with 2 runners and the mounting flange)
4. plenum (what the 4 runners plug into).
5. throttle body, which also has the TPS switch on it.
6. relay board (which is probably there with the carb swap, but may have extra jumper wires on it)
7. injectors (4 of them, yellow for 1.7, green for 2.0)
8. fuel rails (just metal tubes, two side tubes "teed" to one cross tube. two pieces)
9. CHT (still available new, aka Temp Sensor II)
10. IAT (still available new, aka Temp Sensor I)
11. EFI fuel pump
12. EFI fuel hose (about 15 ft)
13. vacuum hose
14. cold-start valve/injector
15. thermo-time switch
16. fuel pressure regulator
17. EFI wiring harness

Brad Anders' site has lists of all of the important part numbers, esp. which ECU goes with which MPS. Jeff Bowlsby will sell you a BRAND-NEW EFI wiring harness, and if the stock harness is at all suspect, you'd be silly not to buy it.

The stock fuel pump can be substituted with any fuel pump capable of generating the necessary pressure, as in a used pump from a newer car with EFI on it will do just fine.

The 1.7 plenum is small, looking like a black tube with runner spigots on it, and the throttle body laid to one side. The 2.0 plenum is a box, and the throttle body points straight up. The runners match the plenum. You could probably use a 2.0 plenum and runners on a 1.7 (probably!), though 1.7 parts are more readily available used. 1.7 parts could be used on a 2.0 in a real pinch, though you'll likely lose some top end power.

Injectors (yellow = 1.7, green = 2.0) MUST match the engine size.

The early 2.0 ECU is the same as the '73 1.7 ECU, they just used a resistor in line with the CHT on the 2.0. This is discussed on Anders' site.

You could probably use either setup on a 1.8 and get away with it. You could also use a 1.8 L-Jet setup on a 1.7 or 2.0 and get away with it. You'd be more likely to be successful with the L-Jet setup, really, so if you're starting completely from scratch, that might be the better way to go. No help from Anders here, though, and I don't have much data on L-Jet.

Hose routing diagrams are available on Pelican Parts' tech section.

(more to come...)

entry Jan 9 2006, 06:29 PM
Fuel sender connections:

Looking at the sender connector on top of the tank, up is towards the front of the car, the connectors are 1, 2, 3, 4 left to right, top to bottom (1 is upper left, 2 is upper right, 3 is lower left). The connections are green 1, black 2, brown 3. I suspect this means: 2 to +12, 1 to gauge, 3 to gauge light, but I haven't verified that, yet.

entry Jan 4 2006, 07:36 PM
The best reason to put MS on a stock engine is if you're converting from carbs, or you have a dead MPS. I'd say that in a few years, good MPSes will be so uncommon that it will be much cheaper to do MS than it would be to find a complete set of working D-Jet parts. I don't think we've quite reached that point yet, but we're close.

You can use the stock injectors, though the 2.0 injectors are pretty marginal, as they're so big that getting good idle is difficult. The problem is that with their size, you start to run into practical limits on how short the pulsewidth (the length of time the injector is open) can be. 1.7-1.8ms is pretty close to the lower limit, as the injector takes about 0.8-1.0ms to open fully, and 0.8-1.0ms to close fully. So, at the minimum, you're "open time" is 0, and you're depending on the erratic amount of fuel injected while the injector is opening and closing to supply fuel for idle. Dave Hunt got this to work, but it was a near-run thing. airsix is running smaller than 1.7 injectors (from a Subaru) on his turbo 1.7 at 1.8ms for idle. The D-Jet ECU is all analog, so it can actually do things like use a 1.755ms v. 1.756ms pulsewidth to vary idle quite easily. MS (by default) is limited to 0.1ms steps in the pulsewidth, and there's a 6% difference between 1.7ms and 1.8ms.

The 1.7 injectors actually work better with PEFI on engines up to 180hp or so. I have a 2.0 plenum, throttle body, and runners I intend to run with 1.7 injectors on a 2.2 soon, so we'll see how well it works. If I run into idle problems, I'll probably dig up some smaller injectors.

You can use the stock air temp sensor and the stock CHT with MS, which allows you to program the temp/voltage curves to match your sensors. You can't use the stock TPS, but you can get around that by using the MAPdot mode in MS, which uses changes in the MAP signal for acceleration enrichment. You can use the stock fuel pump and the stock fuel pressure regulator. Converting the regulator to use manifold pressure as the reference, rather than a fixed reference, is a very good idea. airsix posted some photos on how to do this on this board. The idea here is that manifold pressure rises as the throttle is opened, so the relative pressure between the fuel rail and the manifold goes UP near idle, and goes DOWN near WOT, which is the opposite of what you want. By referencing manifold pressure, you "flatten" the fuel curve from idle to WOT, lifting the min pulsewidth and lowering the max. This gives you more tuning latitude at these extremes.

entry Dec 11 2005, 02:57 PM
Bit of a layoff due to holidays, minor injury, and generaly laziness.

The wire runs from the dash area to the relay board area are 16ft long. From the relay board to the right rear taillight cluster is another 8ft. So, 24ft from the dash area to the taillights. This follows the stock route: dash (specfically the +12 junction near the fusebox) along the front firewall ("behind" the pedals) to the center tunnel, along the tunnel top to the rear firewall, around the bulkhead, through the hole, up through the engine shelf, towards the driver's side to the relay board, and back to the rear of the relay board. From there, along the top of the suspension console into the rear trunk, along the driver's side edge to the rear corner to the driver's side taillight, along the bottom of the rear panel to the passenger's side taillight cluster.

The rear firewall is tricky. The hole there is huge (way bigger than necessary), but there's a panel dead head of it, so you have to jog over to the driver's side to run the wires. Lots of cables and tubes in the tunnel made routing very difficult.

Don't do this unless you REALLY want to...

entry Nov 16 2005, 05:15 PM
More on rewiring:

After many delays, I finally pulled all of the stock wiring out of the car. Pulling long runs through small holes with old grommets is hard work. I cut up some sections to make it managable. I was originally hoping to reuse some of the wire, but have since abandoned that idea. Old wire tends to have brittle insulation, and I've now seen cars with insulation so bad that just bending it slightly would break the insulation.

I'm using SXL wire, which is plain stranded copper wire with a modern heat-resistant insulation that should probably outlive me. You can get this wire from a number of places online. Waytek Wire only sells it in 250ft spools (minimum), which adds up to way more wire than you need. You can also only get 12 solid colors. I've had to be fairly inventive on how to use 12 colors to do the whole car without duplicating colors too much.

Everywhere, red is unswitched +12, black is switched +12, and brown is ground. The other colors are:

Front trunk:
Low beams yellow
High beams white
Fogs purple
Left turn gray
Right turn tan
Wipers orange
Horn pink
Fuel level green(4)
Fuel level light green(5)

Green is generally "sensors", and I'm marking the wires with numbered tags to separate them. Note also that I'm restricting myself to one-speed wipers. One could just number tag two orange wires to get two-speed wipers. I'm not showing any headlight motor wiring, partially because I'm intending to not use them (GT-style manual raisers), but wiring them up would happen entirely within the trunk itself. One could use blue for the motor switch to the relay, which (I think) is the only other wire required.

Engine bay:
Coil+ black
Fuel Pump black
Starter yellow(2)
G light blue
Tach green(1)
Oil Pressure green(2)
Oil Temp green(3)

The starter wire is numbered as the factory uses yellow for both low beams and the starter, and I'm going to use yellow for taillights as well as headlights, so the numbers are to separate the starter and taillight wires, both of which have to pass down the tunnel through the firewall to emerge in the engine bay.

Rear trunk:
Taillights yellow(1)
Brake lights pink
Left turn gray
Right turn tan

No reversing lamps. The brakes and the horn both use pink, but they're never really near each other in the harness, so I'm not bothering to number them.

Note that his omits any fuel injection wiring, which, if you're using D-Jet you should just handle with Jeff Bowlsby's repro harness. If you're using aftermarket stuff, like MS, watch this space, as I'll be going that direction.

My plan now is to have a front trunk harness, a dash harness, a tunnel harness, an engine bay harness, and a rear trunk harness. I want to use connectors that allow me to break the harness into these sections (Weatherpak) so the harnesses can be completely removed without lots of pulling long sections through small holes. I'll enlarge holes as required for the connectors to pass through. One day, I'm going to strip and paint this tub, and I don't want to redo this wiring then.

In the front trunk will be a relay board to hold the four relays (hi, lo, fog, horn) and fuses. The long run from the battery to this front board means two 10 gauge red wires will be required. I'm estimating about 30amps total load here with fogs and high beams with the wipers going and the horn blowing. Over the roughly 10ft run, one 10g wire is marginal here. One 12g is marginal for half of this load, so two 10g it is. These two wires will actually run from the battery down the tunnel across forward of the pedals and to the stock junction block in the driver's footwell. Then, from there up through the scuttle into the trunk to the relay board.

The dash harness will connect the gauges, switches, and dash lights into one harness, or perhaps two harnesses (gauges and switches).

The tunnel harness will simply connect the front trunk/dash with the engine bay.

Since I'm considering Megasquirt for the future, I'm planning on using a waterproof box where the stock ECU goes to hold a relay board and the ECU. For now, just the relay board would live there. Pelican Cases (no affiliation with Pelican Parts) makes two likely models, the 1400 and the 1470, which should fit in the ECU space and should hold both neatly. The will be bulkhead connectors to separate things going in and out of the box to keep it all waterproof. The stock relay board will simply vanish, and I may even remove the mounting bits.

The rear relay board will initially just consist of two relays, Main and Fuel Pump, and the Fuel Pump relay will be switched by the Main relay, which will be switched by the ignition key.



entry Nov 1 2005, 05:05 PM
I've been collecting specific HP numbers for years: how much power from what engine size and type.

There are lots of general patterns. Two-valve street engines, for example, typically run 50-80hp/liter. Four-valve street engines usually about 60-90hp/liter. There are a few standouts, like the Honda S2000 (120hp/liter), but most engines fall into the usual range.

Typically, you can always get more power out of an engine of a given size by spinning it faster (and getting it to breathe up there). Race engines are often over 100hp/liter, with two-valve engines being in the 100-120hp/liter range, and four-valve engines up in the 150-200hp/liter range. Again, there are standouts like the typical F1 engine making 900hp out of 3.0L (300hp/liter), but they spin them up above 19K rpm to get there.

This is all NA, btw. Boost changes the picture so much that there's no general pattern. The F1 turbo era had 1200hp out of 1.5 liters at 5 bar of boost, or 800hp/liter. 100hp/liter street engines are the norm when boosted, and 150hp/liter isn't at all uncommon.

In the most recent issue of Racecar Engineering, some numbers stood out. There's a new non-turbo class for rally cars called Super 2000, which is heavily restricted. 2.0L, 8500rpm, 11mm valve lift. This really seems restrictive, considering the S2000 revs higher than that, and it's a street engine. Yet, they're getting 270hp, or 135hp/liter from them, and the power peaks are often as "low" as 7000rpm. Considering rally engines have to have decent drivability and flexibility, this is fairly remarkable. btw, this class may end up supplanting the WRC class in a few years, so it's pretty relevant for rally fans. The good news is a great many manufacturers are building cars for this class, including Suzuki and FIAT, neither of whom compete in WRC now.

And yes, the stock 914 engines are pretty low on the scale: 47-48hp/liter. Even Jake's engines aren't doing much better than 65hp/liter for the long-lived street versions. Most of this is down to the bad head design, and 30 years of R&D by private individuals has managed to raise it up to the point where a decent design just starts off. An early 70s 911 engine, for example, would make 70-80hp/liter, still using two valves and air-cooling.

The kings of NA specific power are two-strokes. A full race high-dollar two-stroke engine can make 400hp/liter (200hp from a 500cc four). 350-380 is more typical for "production" racing engines, like those found in the RS125. Two-strokes are extremely efficient for their size and weight, but have been nagged by poor fuel economy and emissions. This is changing, thanks to scooters (of all things). 50cc scooters fit a legal restriction in the European market, where they're very popular (esp in Italy and Spain). To meet emissions regs, direct fuel injection is now being employed for these engines. There was an far-thinking company in Australia called Orbital that patented a clean injection system for two-strokes. A clean running two-stroke street engine of approx. 1 liter could easily make 200hp yet weigh only 100lbs. Unfortunately, Orbital was unsuccessful in really getting the car makers interested, mostly because even with the direct injection system and a catalyst, it was hard to pass the ULEV and SULEV standards which will become mandatory before 2010.


entry Sep 1 2005, 06:17 PM
Rewiring

A number of wires on my '71 were burnt near the fusebox, and the harness in the front trunk had been hacked up extensively. 35 year old wiring insulation is often brittle, the colors fade (so it's impossible to tell a black wire from a black/purple wire, for example), and connectors corrode. The fusebox had a broken "foot" that held it to the fuse panel.

There are also many things about most OEM harnesses that annoy me, most usually because they seem needlessly complex. I also had ditched several things I no longer needed, like blower motors and parking lights.

So, I'm undergoing a total rewire, which is a pretty big job. It's not something I'd recommend most people do. A used harness is obtainable, and can generally be cleaned up to work. I'm not going to do that, however, as I'm stupid. If you're repairing a car that's had the harness substantially damaged by fire, this may be helpful.

To keep it managable, I'm doing this in stages. I just installed a new engine and new brakes, and I'd really like to drive the car some before gutting all of the wiring, so the first stage will be a partial rewire, hooking up only the minimum. I'll then remove all of the wiring and replace it over the winter months.

The minimum in my book is: coil, alternator field, brake lights, starter. This is literally all you need to have a running daylight only car.

The harness is pretty much all one piece in the 914, which is typical of cars of this era. It runs from the right front light to the left front light down the left bottom of the trunk, below the fuel tank, up to the scuttle (below the windscreen, cheating right to pick up the wipers, front blower, and fuel sender), and down through the scuttle to the driver's footwell near the fusebox. It splits here to the fusebox, the dash, and across the front firewall behind the pedals (picks up the brake switch) and down the center tunnel. After passing through the rear firewall, it turns up and splits again, with several large gauge (10 and 12 gauge) red wires to the battery, and the rest over to the left side to split again to a large ground point, the relay board, and the rear trunk. The relay board splits the wiring to the engine harness (coil, sensors, rear blower). The rear trunk harness runs along the left side to the left rear light, then the right rear light (hitting the license plate lights along the way).

In my view, there should really be five sections: the front, the dash, the engine, the rear, and the tunnel section.

If you disconnect and completely remove the fusebox, and disconnect all of the wires from the switches, you can pull the wiring through the scuttle grommet into the front trunk. Some of the dash to fusebox wires will also now simply be loose. The rest will connect to the tunnel section. You'll also notice there's a junction in the driver footwell joining some large red wires from the tunnel (from the battery + post) to a lot of smaller red wires to divide up the power. Remove all but tunnel red wires, and two of the smaller red wires from this junction. Here's your primary power source.

Connect one red wire (small is OK, like 18g) to the ignition switch. Connect the other to a 30amp relay, which will provide the switched +12. Connect the switched terminal from the ignition switch to the relay switch terminal. One (brown) ground wire off the relay, then the remaining connection is the primary switched power source. This will connect to many things eventually. For now, using a small bolt, nut, and a pair of insulating washers to connect it to someplace on the body, with the free end of the bolt past the nut pointing out at some convenient angle. Use ring terminals on this bolt with a second nut to split the switched power to the black wire on the tunnel section, one terminal on the brake light switch, and one terminal on the G light in the combo gauge.

The blue wire in the tunnel section needs to connect to other terminal on the G light. This light is required to make the charging system work. The engine bay end of the blue wire connects to the D+ terminal on the voltage regulator. This normally connects to a pin on the relay board, which then connects both to the D+ terminal on the VR and the alternator. You can do this if your relay board is intact, or just plug the VR directly into the plug off the alternator, and splice into the red wire. Finally, you can simply connect it to the D+ post on the alternator with a ring terminal, along with the red wire to the VR. If you need to remake this bit of wiring, the red D+ connects to D+, DF to DF, and D- to D- (red, black, brown).

The brake light switch should connect to the black/yellow wire in the tunnel section. This should go all the way back to the left taillight housing, and daisy chain to the right taillight housing.

The final wire you'll need is to connect the yellow wire from the tunnel section to the starter terminal on the ignition switch. This simply goes back and connects to the spade terminal on the starter solenoid (it goes through the relay board stock).

From the battery + post, there are two large wires that go into the center tunnel, and one very large wire that goes through the rear tin, over the gearbox, and connects to the starter solenoid. If this isn't intact, you'll need to make something like this. You can use one 12g wire from + through the tunnel to our relay, but the wire from the + post to the starter needs to be pretty large, like 4g. You can also run the 4g wire ONLY from the + post to the starter, then run the 12g wire with a ring off the same post on the starter forward through the tin, using same hole as the yellow starter wire.

With all of this hooked up, and the - strap on the battery, and a ground strap from the transmission to the bottom of the trunk (above the tail cover on the transaxle), the car should start and run if you have carbs. The brake lights should work, the G light should work, so you should see 13.5 to 14.5v at the battery terminals with the engine running.

If you have EFI, there's quite a bit more wiring to do, enough that finding a new all-white harness (if yours has been destroyed) for the ECU would be a very good idea. I'll fully describe wiring for EFI in a later post. It will likely be for aftermarket EFI, but much of it should be relavent to D-jet, too.


entry Aug 31 2005, 04:22 PM
Where do 914s rust?

The worst places are the main structures along the sides of the car, the longitudinal beams, or "longs". These run from the front wheel well back to the rear suspension mounts. The most vulnerable spot is beneath the battery on the passenger side of the engine compartment. Batteries leak acid, which mixes with water, dirt, leaves, and other cruft to eat away at the section just forward of the battery down by the firewall, called the "hell hole". ANY rust here is a problem, even if it looks like it's only on the surface. Prodding at this with a sharp object like a Phillips screwdriver is very important. The rear suspension mount just below the battery also needs to be checked, along with the section behind the valance along the side, below the door.

The jack posts frequently rust out, often eating into the long, too.

Any rust-through on the longs would be grounds to walk away from a potential purchase. Fixing this is possible, but requires a great deal of work and much welding.

If everything LOOKS OK, here, then try this simple test: open the passenger door, and close it gently. It should close with a nice click. If it takes effort to close it, look carefully at the gap between the door and the rear fender. If it's tight at the top and/or loose at the bottom, the car is sagging in the center from a badly rotted long. Repeat this test, only with you sitting in the passenger seat.

The rear trunk floor often rusts near the taillights, usually from bad seals.

The front trunk is often covered with surface rust, which isn't a huge problem.

The floors can rust under the undercoating often applied to the outside, and the soundproofing applied to the inside. In bad cases, this may extend into the crossmember or center tunnel. You often see rust under the rear window on the inside (behind the backpad) caused by a leaky rear window seal. The section where the floor meets the back wall of the cabin is a great place for rust to form. Most of the floors are not structural, so it's not too critical as long as it hasn't also spread into the back wall or the crossmember or tunnel.

On those cars with vinyl on the targa bar, you frequently get rust under the vinyl, most often where the chrome trip clips to the body. The chrome trim around the windscreen is also a prime rust point.

Finally, bubbling paint at the base of the windscreen pillars is not uncommon, as well as around the inner lip of the front trunk, where the seal goes.

entry Aug 5 2005, 12:56 PM
Converting a tail-shifter car to side-shifter.

The '70-'72 cars came with the tail-shifter gearbox, where the '73-'76 cars used the side-shifter. The side-shifter has half as many nylon bushings in the linkage, and is substantially easier to adjust, than the tail-shifter. The shift action of a side-shifter with new bushings is also much better than a tail-shifter with new bushings. So, since side-shifters are pretty common on market, converting an older tub to the newer gearbox is generally a win.

The 914/6, btw, used yet another shift linkage, which isn't covered here.

To do this, you'll need a side-shift gearbox, of course. It's possible to convert a tail-shifter to a side-shifter, but the parts are hard to obtain, and there are plenty of used side-shifters in the world. All of the tail-shifter gearbox parts other than the linkage and the end cover can be used in the side-shifter to refurbish it. You'll also need:

- the complete gear linkage, including the gear lever assembly inside the car (they're quite different [picture]), the rod from the gear lever to the firewall, the U-joint coupler at the firewall, the rear rod from the coupler to the shift console, and the cup.

- new bushings. You can get complete kits from various suppliers that include all of the nylon bushings, plus new cone screws used to attach the coupler to the rods. You'll need a special bushing at the firewall, made specifically to install a side-shifter rod in a tail-shift tub. The hole in the firewall on the tailshift tubs is substantially larger than the hole on the side-shift tubs, so the bushing is thicker to take up the clearance between the hole and the skinnier side-shifter forward rod. These conversion bushings are also available as part of the complete kits.

- engine mounting bar and mounts. If you're keeping your old engine, you need to replace the engine mounting bar with the cast side-shift mounting bar. The rear side-shift linkage rod won't clear the tail-shift bar. When they switched bars, they also swapped where the rubber mounts go. On the tail-shifter, the bar-to-body mounts are rubber, and the bar-to-engine mounts are solid. On the side-shifter, the bar-to-body mounts are solid, and the bar-to-engine mounts are rubber. The bar-to-body mounts can be picked up new (complete with the correct bolts and nuts to mount the bar itself), as can the bar-to-engine mounts. The bar itself will have to be purchased used. You'll also need the small pieces that connect the engine to the rubber mounts. Replacing the mounting bar on the engine with the fan housing in place is possible, but you may find it easier to remove the housing.

The tail-shifter linkage consists of: the gear lever assembly, the forward rod from the shift lever to the adjuster just forward of the firewall, the center "L", with the nylon ball [picture], the "hex ball" attached to the rear of the firewall, and the aft rod with the "L" tube the center "L" ball fits into. There may still be a cover over the L section on your car, which just pulls off the firewall (there may be a zip-tie holding it on). The aft rod connects to the tail part of the gearbox in a knife-and-fork arrangement. This may also have a squareish cover on it.

To remove the tail-shifter aft linkage rod, you need to unbolt the support bracket at the tail end of the gearbox (forward of the knife-and-fork), and unbolt the large hex ball support at the firewall end of the aft linkage rod. The center L comes out after you disconnect the adjuster in the cabin, under the access panel at the rear of the center tunnel [picture]. You must completely remove the bolt to get the adjuster clamp off the rod, and you must remove that clamp to get the rod out of the car, as it has to go back through the firewall bushing. The clamp is held on with a 13mm bolt and a 13mm nut, and getting wrenches on both is not easy. Remove this, and you'll know why adjusting the tail-shifter is such a pain.

This is also a good time to replace the clutch and speedo cables with new items if yours are marginal, as you'll be disconnecting both to pull the engine.

Yes, you need to remove the engine to make this swap. Actually, you COULD do it with the engine in place, but you need to swap mounting bars, and while the bars are off and the engine is resting on a jack or whatever, the firewall bushing and the forward linkage rod for the side-shifter need to be installed. You cannot install the side-shifter rod with the engine and the mounting bar in place. Since doing all of this with the engine just above you is pretty unnerving, I'd just remove the engine. Gives you a chance to clean up the engine compartment some, too. Engine pulls are documented elsewhere, I'll not repeat how to do this here.

After the engine is out, pull the linkage bits that are inside the car. The gear lever unbolts with three bolts, and just pulls up. There's a cup on the end of the forward rod that needs to be removed, as well as a support bracket. The forward rod can then be pulled back through the firewall bushing. The engine has to be out before this can happen.

Remove the firewall bushing using a screwdriver to pry it out. It will bend easily, so use just a bit of force. To install the special conversion firewall bushing, put the bushing in a cup of water and heat it in a microwave for a few minutes. This should soften it enough that you can pound it into the hole with a mallet. You can also press the bushing into place using a long bolt with large washers on each end. Run the bolt with one washer through the firewall hole from the inside, and put a socket and extension on it. Put the bushing onto the bolt, then another big washer, then a nut. Tighten the nut and the bushing will press into place. The bolt has to be fairly long (4-6"). The bolt holding the transmission ears to the body mounts works very well, as long as you use a couple of 1/2" sockets as spacers. Make sure you get this bushing well seated, as it can pop out easily if you don't, and getting it to fit again if it does pop out involves dismantling much of the shift linkage (again).

Grease the firewall bushing, and slide the forward rod on the side-shift linkage into it. The splined end goes in the car, and the tapered end with one hole hangs out into the engine bay. The rod will likely be a snug fit in the bushing, and you may need to tap it into the car with a mallet. Leave the tapered end plus a bit of the rod hanging free.

Rebuild the coupler with the new bushings from the kit. The pin presses out using a drift and a hammer, or a vice and a socket. Tap it back in with a hammer. Attach the rebuilt coupler to the foward linkage rod with a new cone screw from the bushings kit.

Swap out the rubber tail-shifter engine body mounts with the new solid mounts, and swap the engine mounting bars. The rubber tail-shifter body mount CAN be used to hold a side-shifter engine in a pinch, but the engine hangs lower, and the extra movement can make shifting harder, as it messes with the geometry of the shifter.

Install the engine with the new gearbox.

Where the side-shift linkage attaches to the gearbox is called the shift console. Install a new shift console bushing in the hole (channel locks used like a vice are good for snapping this into place), and install the aft linkage rod by sliding one end into this new bushing, then the forward end into the coupler. This usually requires a bit of angling to get it to all slide into place. Fit a new cup bushing to the gearbox shift ball, after greasing the new bushing. This is a very snug fit, so you may need to whack it on with a mallet. Don't put the bushing in the cup first, just leave it free. Attach the rear cup using a new cone screw, and slide the cup onto the bushing.

Install the gear lever in the car. You'll want to attach the clevis onto the gear lever (remember the bronze bushing and some grease), then slide the clevis onto the splined end of the linkage rod. Bolt the gear lever plate to the center tunnel. Don't fit the clamp bolt for the clevis, yet.

To adjust the linkage, put the gearbox in second gear at the gearbox itself, by moving the shift rod (the bit with the ball-and-cup at the aft end [picture]). The gearbox shift rod moves in and out as the gear lever is moved from side to side, and rotates as the gear lever is moved fore and aft. Rotating it aft is the same as pushing the gear lever forward. So, second gear is with the shift rod in the halfway position (in/out), and rotating aft.

With the gearbox in second, get in the driver's seat and hold the aft end of the linkage rod through the rear access panel in the center tunnel using channel locks or vice grips (lightly!). Move the gear lever so it's forward and left so it's just resting lightly against the sprung lockout plate. Fit the clamp bolt on the clevis and tighten it. Move the gear lever through the gears to see if you can get all of the gears. You'll probably need to repeat this process once you have the car running again. Ideally, the 2nd/3rd plane should have the lever just kissing the lockout plate, but not pushing against the spring. This pretty much ensures you're not going to snag reverse instead of second, or first instead of third.

Make sure you check the gearbox oil before starting the engine for the first time.

This entire process CAN be done in one weekend, after you assemble all of the parts.

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